I appreciate how smartphones have now evolved to serve distinct audiences – whether your priorities lie in photography, portability, seamless multitasking, or exceptional battery endurance.
Redmagic has exemplified this with its latest gaming phone, the 11 Pro, which features not one, but three cooling systems to keep temperatures low while you annihilate your foes in the most graphics-intensive titles. One of those is an eye-catching industry first: liquid cooling that you can actually see.
The Nubia gaming-focused subsidiary says its AquaCore cooling system makes the 11 Pro the first mass-produced phone with "AI server-grade fluorinated liquid cooling to enhance heat dissipation."
What's especially neat is that the coolant flows through a transparent circular channel on the rear panel, so you can see it at work when you can direct your gaze away from your games long enough. Redmagic says this system has been extensively drop tested, and can also withstand extremely high and low temperatures.
In addition, there's a glowing little fan quietly whirring away at 24,000 RPM, the largest vapor chamber you'll find in any phone today built in, and a sizeable vent in the side panel that's also properly water resistant. Together, they help dissipate heat efficiently; reviews say this allows you to game for hours at the highest graphics settings and the device won't get more than just a tad warm.
The 11 Pro has a bunch more gaming-focused features: sliding a red switch on the side panel enables Game Mode, where you can find and launch all your installed titles, adjust performance settings, tweak on-screen controls, and enable gameplay recording. There are three performance modes to choose from, which let the phone draw more power to maximize frame rates at high-fidelity graphics settings.
The side panel also houses a pair of highly responsive shoulder buttons that you can use in most games. The display, as you'd expect in this category, is a 144-Hz 6.85-inch AMOLED with a 2,688 x 1,216-pixel resolution and 3,000-Hz touch sampling rate. Since you wouldn't want a camera cutout obscuring your view while gaming, Redmagic's hidden a serviceable 16-megapixel shooter under the display, along with an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor.
There are also stereo speakers that appear to get fairly loud, a 3.5-mm headphone jack for zero-latency audio that should come in handy in multiplayer titles, and a ginormous 7,500-mAh battery which is said to be good for about 8-9 hours of Call of Duty Mobile at max settings. Plus, you can juice up the 11 Pro wirelessly or at 80 W over a cable; it can even bypass the battery and simply run off power from a wall outlet if you're neck-deep in an intense gaming session.
There's a boatload of processing power on tap too. This is one of the first handsets to be powered by Qualcomm's latest flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip at 4.6 GHz, and you can pair it with up to 24 GB RAM and 1 TB of UFS 4.1 Pro storage.
The 11 Pro isn't going to win awards for its photography chops, but you'll get a decent dual-lens camera setup, with a 50-megapixel main shooter at a 23 mm equivalent focus, and an ultrawide 14 mm equivalent, along with a depth sensor. It'll do 8K video if you like, and 4K at 60 frames per second too.
That's all wrapped up in an aluminum=alloy frame and protective Corning Gorilla Glass on the front and back. It's understandably a tad thick at 8.9 mm, and weighs 230 g – even more than a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7. Given all the hardware and promised performance, I'd say that's a worthwhile trade-off.
The Redmagic 11 Pro is listed on its site at a starting price of US$699, though The Verge notes it's expected to land at $749 from November 19. Unfortunately, that'll only net you the basic black Cryo colorway, which hides the liquid cooling ring beneath its rear panel. The black Nightfreeze and silver Cryo variants with transparent backs start at $849, with more storage and RAM.
Product page: Redmagic 11 Pro
